Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America

This engrossing piece of undercover reportage has been a fixture on the New York Times best seller list since its publication. With nearly a million copies in print, Nickel and Dimed is a modern classic that deftly portrays the plight of America's working-class poor.

Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America

Americans are a "positive" people - cheerful, optimistic, and upbeat: this is our reputation as well as our self-image. But more than a temperament, being positive, we are told, is the key to success and prosperity. In this utterly original take on the American frame of mind, Barbara Ehrenreich traces the strange career of our sunny outlook from its origins as a marginal 19th-century healing technique to its enshrinement as a dominant, almost mandatory, cultural attitude.

This Land Is Their Land: Reports from a Divided Nation

Here they are, the 2000s, and Barbara Ehrenreich's antidotes are as sardonic as they are spot-on: pet insurance for your kids; Salvation Army fashions for those who can no longer afford Wal-Mart; and boundless rage against those who have given us a nation scarred by deepening inequality, corroded by distrust, and shamed by its official cruelty.

White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America

In White Trash, Nancy Isenberg upends assumptions about America's supposedly class-free society. Poor whites were central to the rise of the Republican Party in the early 19th century, and the Civil War itself was fought over class issues nearly as much as it was fought over slavery. Reconstruction pitted poor white trash against newly freed slaves, which factored in the rise of eugenics. These poor were at the heart of New Deal reforms and LBJ's Great Society; they haunt us in reality TV shows like Here Comes Honey Boo Boo and Duck Dynasty.

Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth About Everything

In middle age, Ehrenreich came across the journal she had kept during her tumultuous adolescence and set out to reconstruct that quest, which had taken her to the study of science and through a cataclysmic series of uncanny - or as she later learned to call them, "mystical" - experiences. A staunch atheist and rationalist, she is profoundly shaken by the implications of her life-long search. Certain to be a classic, Living with a Wild God combines intellectual rigor with a frank account of the inexplicable, in Ehrenreich's singular voice, to produce a true literary achievement.

American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Rich

Like every other prospering democracy, the United States developed a mixed economy that channeled the spirit of capitalism into strong growth and healthy social development. In this bargain, government and business were as much partners as rivals. Public investments in education, science, transportation, and technology laid the foundation for broadly based prosperity.

Joseph M. Hidalgo says:"Very insightful! Technical at first but a must read for today's political environment!!"

White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide

As Ferguson, Missouri, erupted in August 2014, and media commentators across the ideological spectrum referred to the angry response of African Americans as 'black rage', historian Carol Anderson wrote a remarkable op-ed in the Washington Post showing that this was, instead, 'white rage at work. With so much attention on the flames,' she wrote, 'everyone had ignored the kindling.'

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

In this brilliant, heartbreaking book, Matthew Desmond takes us into the poorest neighborhoods of Milwaukee to tell the story of eight families on the edge. Arleen is a single mother trying to raise her two sons on the $20 a month she has left after paying for their rundown apartment. Scott is a gentle nurse consumed by a heroin addiction. Lamar, a man with no legs and a neighborhood full of boys to look after, tries to work his way out of debt. Vanetta participates in a botched stickup after her hours are cut.

Michelle Leopold says:"Read this powerful book about USA's social justice"

The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America

In The Unwinding, George Packer, author of The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq, tells the story of the United States over the past three decades in an utterly original way, with his characteristically sharp eye for detail and gift for weaving together complex narratives. The Unwinding portrays a superpower in danger of coming apart at the seams, its elites no longer elite, its institutions no longer working, its ordinary people left to improvise their own schemes for success and salvation.

Why the Right Went Wrong: Conservatism from Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond

Why the Right Went Wrong offers a historical view of the right since the 1960s. Its core contention is that American conservatism and the Republican Party took a wrong turn when they adopted Barry Goldwater's worldview during and after the 1964 campaign. Since 1968, no conservative administration could live up to the rhetoric rooted in the Goldwater movement that began to reshape American politics 50 years ago.

Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America

In her thought-provoking voice, Tirado discusses how she went from lower-middle class, to sometimes middle class, to poor and everything in between, and in doing so reveals why "poor people don't always behave the way middle-class America thinks they should."

Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?

It is a widespread belief among liberals that if only Democrats can continue to dominate national elections, if only those awful Republicans are beaten into submission, the country will be on the right course. But this is to fundamentally misunderstand the modern Democratic Party. Drawing on years of research and first-hand reporting, Frank points out that the Democrats have done little to advance traditional liberal goals: expanding opportunity, fighting for social justice, and ensuring that workers get a fair deal.

It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism

Congressional scholars Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein identify two overriding problems that have led Congress—and the United States—to the brink of institutional collapse. But they offer a panoply of useful ideas and reforms, endorsing some solutions, like greater public participation and institutional restructuring, while debunking others, like independent or third-party candidates. Above all, they call on the media as well as the public to focus on the true causes of dysfunction rather than just throwing the bums out every election cycle.

Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War

Why we think it’s a great listen: A performance so poignant, we gave Bronson Pinchot (yes, Balki from Perfect Strangers) our inaugural Narrator of the Year award.... In the monsoon season of 1968-69 at a fire support base called Matterhorn, located in the remote mountains of Vietnam, a young and ambitious Marine lieutenant wants to command a company to further his civilian political ambitions. But two people stand in his way.

Writing Creative Nonfiction

Bringing together the imaginative strategies of fiction storytelling and new ways of narrating true, real-life events, creative nonfiction is the fastest-growing part of the creative writing world. It's a cutting-edge genre that's reshaping how we write (and read) everything from biographies and memoirs to blogs and public speaking scripts to personal essays and magazine articles.

$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America

There are, in the United States, a significant and growing number of families who live on less than $2.00 per person, per day. That figure, the World Bank measure of poverty, is hard to imagine in this country - most of us spend more than that before we get to work or school in the morning.

Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis

It's the American dream: get a good education, work hard, buy a house, and achieve prosperity and success. This is the America we believe in - a nation of opportunity, constrained only by ability and effort. But during the last 25 years we have seen a disturbing "opportunity gap" emerge. Americans have always believed in equality of opportunity, the idea that all kids, regardless of their family background, should have a decent chance to improve their lot in life.

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

For two thousand years, cadavers have been involved in science's boldest strides and weirdest undertakings. They've tested France's first guillotines, ridden the NASA Space Shuttle, been crucified in a Parisian laboratory to test the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin, and helped solve the mystery of TWA Flight 800. For every new surgical procedure, from heart transplants to gender reassignment surgery, cadavers have been there alongside surgeons, making history in their quiet way.

Publisher's Summary

The best-selling author of Nickel and Dimed goes back undercover to do for America's ailing middle class what she did for the working poor.

Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed explored the lives of low-wage workers. Now, in Bait and Switch, she enters another hidden realm of the economy: the world of the white-collar unemployed. Armed with a plausible resume of a professional "in transition", Ehrenreich attempts to land a middle class job undergoing career coaching and personality testing, then begins trawling a series of EST-like boot camps, job fairs, networking events, and evangelical job-search "ministries". She gets an image makeover to prepare her for the corporate world and works hard to project the winning attitude recommended for a successful job search. She is proselytized, scammed, lectured, and, again and again, rejected.

Bait and Switch highlights the people who've done everything right: gotten college degrees, developed marketable skills, and built up impressive resumes, yet have become repeatedly vulnerable to financial disaster and not simply due to the vagaries of the business cycle. Today's ultra-lean corporations take pride in shedding their "surplus" employees, plunging them, for months or years at a stretch, into the twilight zone of white-collar unemployment, where job-searching becomes a full-time job in itself. As Ehrenreich discovers, there are few social supports for the new disposable workers, and little security even for those who have jobs.

A terrible read. This book might as well have been written by someone who had lived in a cave for the last 30 years and decided to go seek an executive job and complained about how hard it was. The book does a terrible disservice to the white collar unemployed, since many of these folks do face extreme hardships, often through no fault of their own (whereas the book definitely makes it obvious to me that I would never hire the author in a million years, so she should stop whining). The author's prior book, Nickeled and Dimed, was at least a more enjoyable read, but now I'm beginning to wonder if that too wasn't completely overdramatized by this princess of an author. A few highlights of the book:

1) The author decides to seek an executive job, but has absolutely no prior relevant experience. When seeking a sales job for example, she says she wants to be the sales manager, though she has no sales experience. Is it no surprise she doesn't get a job?
2) The author seeks out a strange group of coaches (which I have to wonder if she has misrepresented these poor folks as well, given the rest of the book). The coaches ask her to take several personality tests. She fabricates random answers to these tests. The tests, given the random answers, point her in many different directions. Author's conclusion: the tests are worthless (they may be, but making up random answers wouldn't be my way of proving it)

3) The author obtains further advice. She is 'surprised' that corporate hiring managers would like to hire people that are likable and that can dress appropriately for an interview. Granted, this may be strange and foreign to those that have never held a job before, but for a mid-age worker seeking an executive position, you would think that this wouldn't be a surprise.

4) The author find some independent rep sales positons. She is 'surprised' that she is not given an office'

After getting a very interesting, entertaining and elucidating look at the world of low-wage workers in Nickel & Dimed, I looked forward to something similar from Bait & Switch.

Unfortunately, this book failed to live up to even it's back-cover synopsis. All I got was an uninspired look at a bumbling job search. No insight on the risks and hardships of working in corporate america.

Failing to provide any first-hand insight (or even very much 2nd-hand insight) on the issue, the author also fails to offer any research-based insight into the issues of lack of medical care, job security, etc.

Although the author admits to having little experience with applying to a 'corporate' position, her naivete regarding this pursuit becomes almost unbearable near the middle of the book.
Lost in the quagmire of coaching and image consultants, she seems to lose touch with the essence of what makes unemployment an interesting topic of study.
If you can hold on that long, her conclusions are interesting, yet do not contain the depth I would expect from an individual who makes her 'real' living from observation and interpretation.

This was the most engaging and enlightening audiobook I've heard in a very long time, and I listen to plenty. It's thoroughly thought out and beautifully written. More important, it's a startling reality check, and a much-needed antidote to the toxic fantasies of the inspiration industry. If you're one of white-collar unemployed, it's not necessarily your fault, and if you can't find a job right away, that doesn't mean there's something wrong with your soul. Ms. Ehrenreich's last chapter is a good beginning for thought on what might be wrong with the system, and what might be done about it. I can't recommend this too strongly.

I am disappointed in this purchase because the reader has a speech impediment that ruins it for me. I loved the book "Nickel and Dimed." I will buy the book read it and I am sure I will enjoy it, but I simply can not listen to this reader. I wasted a credit. If this sort of thing bothers you, beware.

This author brought allot of preconceived notions to her book and did not take a balanced look at the job market. She went on her own personal quest to prove an argument that would sell book copies and support her title. The focus of the book is from her personal experience instead of basing it on statistics or proving broader social and economic trends.

This book will open your eyes to a part of America that many of us in the middle class don't see or choose to ignore. It has made me much more appreciative of hotel maids and others who do the really tough jobs. I now make it a point to smile and offer a kind word that will hopefully help them through the day.

Ehrenreich deftly examines the state of white collar employment in America. Eye-opening proof that the middle class in this country is in big trouble, and white collar workers are definitely not exempt.